Admitted Students: Things to Know

University of Vermont Convocation in Burlington on Sunday, August 29, 2021. Photo by Glenn Russell

If you’ve opened this blog, you’ve most likely made it through your college search and are finishing up your high school senior year! Maybe you’ve already committed to UVM (congrats- we can’t wait to see you!) or maybe you’re still on the fence about where you want to go. Regardless, all of us here at BORED send massive kudos to you. You’ve made it through the hard part! But now what? Hopefully this blog will help you get closer to answering that question. Here are some snippets of information, tips and tricks, and advice we’ve compiled to help you before you arrive at UVM!  

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Learning Communities 

When you fill out your Housing and Meal Plan contract, you’ll notice that you will be asked to rank learning communities based on your interests. But what exactly are they? Essentially, your learning community determines the group of people you live with. They are built around a common theme and designed to bring students with a shared interest together. Our current learning communities are Arts and Creativity, Global Connections, The Honors College, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Social Change, Liberal Arts Scholars Program (LASP), Outdoor Experience, Sustainability, the Wellness Environment (WE), and new to the 2023-2024 school year, the Gaming Collective. Each Learning Community has a full-time staff that supports each student’s residential experience and arranges activities centered around their community’s theme. These communities are spread across all four of UVM’s campuses: Athletic Campus, Central Campus, Redstone Campus, and Trinity Campus. The locations and specific buildings each learning community occupies vary per year, but you can find the upcoming year’s locations here.  

Dining 

Dining looks different for everyone, so it’s important to know your options. There are four traditional dining halls (all-you-care-to-eat) at UVM: one on each campus. These are Harris-Millis Dining on Athletic Campus, Central Dining on Central Campus, Simpson Dining on Redstone Campus, and Northside Dining on Trinity Campus. In addition to our dining halls, there are also a variety of retail options on campus: the Given Bistro, New World Tortilla, Redstone Market, the Marketplace, The Skinny Pancake, University Marche, UVM Dairy Bar, Waterman Café, Campus Perk, and Twelve.  

All on-campus students are required to have a meal plan. There are four meal plans that will be offered for the year 2023-2024. First-years are assigned the All-Access Plan for their first semester at UVM, with the option to switch to a different plan later. The All-Access Plan offers unlimited Meal Swipes into the dining halls, as well as 150 retail points and 3 guest meals per semester. One retail point is equivalent to $1 and can be used at any dining location on campus. Guest meals allow you to swipe another person into a traditional dining hall. The other three plans are All Access Plus, the Flex Plan and the Retail Point plan, which you can learn more about here.  

Transportation 

First-years are unable to have cars on campus, but there are many transportation options available to help you get around! Even though UVM has four different campuses, most of your classes will be on Central Campus, where most of our academic buildings are located. Overall, UVM campus is very walkable. To get from Redstone Campus to Trinity Campus, the two furthest campuses from each other, is about a 25-minute walk. Many students at UVM enjoy biking, skateboarding or rollerblading to class. Each residence hall has a bike rack for storage, and there are other bike racks around campus, so make sure to bring a lock if you’re planning on bringing your bike to school! There is also an on-campus shuttle called the CatBus running from 7:30am-10pm on weekdays and from 4:30pm-10pm on weekends that runs through all four campuses. An additional shuttle called the Redstone Express brings students back and forth between Central campus and Redstone campus between 7:45am-5pm on weekdays. To track these shuttles, you can either download the Transloc app on your phone or go to this website.  

There are plenty of off-campus transportation options as well! Church Street downtown is around a 20-minute walk from Central Campus. UVM students also have access to the Green Mountain Transit, which runs buses all through the state of Vermont. These buses are completely free for UVM students and can take you from frequently visited spots nearby such as Church Street, the Waterfront and University Mall, to places further away, such as Montpelier. You can download the Transit app to discover routes and track these buses. You can also take the GMT directly to the Essex Junction Amtrak station, where you can get on buses/trains out of state, which is super convenient for traveling over breaks. Burlington International Airport is located just a few miles from campus, which you can utilize for travel worldwide.  

Resources 

If I mentioned everything I wish admitted students would know before they got to UVM, it would fill a thousand blogs! So instead, I’m dedicating this last section to sharing some resources that have helped me out over my time here so far, and that will hopefully help you! 

Undergraduate Writing Center and the Tutoring Center 

Our Undergraduate Writing Center has over 40 peer tutors from various backgrounds to help you with academic, personal and professional writing projects. These are students selected specifically by professors to assist their peers in all types of writing. You can go to them with a prompt or a fully written paper- they will help you with whatever you bring.  

Through the Tutoring Center, individual and group tutoring are available for a wide range of subjects, covering specific topics, larger concepts and developing study skills. Every student is eligible for one free hour of tutoring per class, per week. This means if you’re taking 5 classes, for example, you have five hours of tutoring to utilize however you wish. You can use all your hours for one class or split it evenly between them- the choice is yours.  

Student Health Services and LivingWell 

Student Health Services covers a variety of services, including primary care, behavioral health, mental health support, immunizations, gender-affirming healthcare, sexual and reproductive health and nutrition services.  

LivingWell is a drop-in health center located in the center of campus in the Davis Center, offering massages, drop-in counseling, therapy dogs, help changing habits and safer sex supplies – all for free! 

Identity Centers 

Interfaith Center– No matter how you make meaning of your life, you are welcome at the Interfaith Center for reflection, spiritual practice, education, and community building.

Mosaic Center for Students of Color– Supports the holistic development of self-identified students of color so that they can obtain their goals for academic achievement, personal growth, identity formation, and cultural development. 

Prism Center-Supports and empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer students, as well as students whose identities fall in between or expand beyond those categories, and work to create a campus community where people of all sexual and gender identities can thrive. 

Women & Gender Equity Center (WAGE)– Strives for a brave, diverse, and equitable learning environment for all members of the UVM community. They provide advocacy services for those in our community who have experienced sexual or intimate partner violence, and strive to provide programming, education, and events that ask our community to explore the intersections of their gender and other identities. 

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I hope this blog helped you get a better idea of what to expect at UVM and answered some questions you may have had. The transition to college can be difficult at first, but there are so many people here to support you. Eventually, I hope that UVM will become a second home for you like it is for me. You got this!

<3 Emily I.